Audio messages don’t work with AirPods?

When I use my AirPods, the microphone works fine for talking to Siri, dictation, and it even works better with phone calls. However, there seems to be some sort of problem with AirPods not being able to record audio messages. The problem has degrees of severity, but I have never had or known someone who used audio messages and had AirPods that did this 100% correctly. I have issues with audio messages playing at a very low volume, only playing in one ear, or not playing at all. Recording audio is also difficult. The microphone will often not pick up sound, or will not start recording until an indeterminate amount of time has passed. As many of my friends are blind, it is hard for them to see when the waveform actually picks up sound or when it starts picking up sound. When I looked for answers to this on the web, any responses from Apple redirected to answering questions about Siri reading texts or about how to tell if your AirPods microphone is working. It seemed oddly evasive, and I’m starting to think that Apple is aware that all AirPods have this problem, and I haven’t seen any sort of plan of action for how they intend to fix it. I know that setting your microphone to one airpod or the other and turning off speaker mode when listening to messages can help with this problem, but does anyone else have any other suggestions?